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The End of the World is Nigh!
Nostradamus quatrain 9 44:
Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,
Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,
Raypoz will exterminate all who oppose him,
Before the coming the sky will show signs.
http://www.virginmedia.com/digital/s...p?vmsrc=vmhpld
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
cool! :afrog: I can't wait. Hopefully no-one will stop... whoever is switching on the machine.
(PS: Where is the date of that article? :confused: )
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Trust Virgin Media not to display the date, but what to expect when the company is named after someone who has never done the business :rolleyes:
It's on todays main page at http://www.virginmedia.com/
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by schoolbusdriver
Your ISP won't ban you if you change your homepage to a news site. :afrog:
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Well, atleast they're being optimistic.
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="world, Armageddon, death"/>
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by syntaxeater
Well, atleast they're being optimistic.
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="world, Armageddon, death"/>
:lol:
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
10 minutes before the Large Hadron Collider is turned on ... Stephen Hawking realizes that this is a miscalculation in his Hawking Radiation theory.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
The Collider
The collider basically consists of a ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors.
When it is at full power, two beams of protons will race around the huge ring 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. They will travel in two tubes and speed through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.
Large detectors and cameras will collect data as the protons collide and 15 petabytes of data will be collected each year equivalent to a pile of CDs 12miles tall
No danger
Martin Rees, a physicist, has estimated the chance of an accelerator producing a global catastrophe at one in 50 million which is about the same odds as winning some lotteries.
Uh-oh there's a one in 50 million chance that a global catastrophe is going to occur.
For 15 petabytes (hadn't heard of a petabyte before) of data to be stored you better have a really good hard drive.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
For 15 petabytes (hadn't heard of a petabyte before) of data to be stored you better have a really good hard drive.
Dont worry - they're uploading the files to gmail. and since your account is continually growing - they should have the first pictures avaliable by, say... 2140.
(Over 7008.324757 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.)
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
Uh-oh there's a one in 50 million chance that a global catastrophe is going to occur.
For 15 petabytes (hadn't heard of a petabyte before) of data to be stored you better have a really good hard drive.
Petabyte is 1,000 terabytes right?
I bought a terabyte external HD for around 220 dollars.
15,000 Terabyte disks maybe for 200 dollars each? So 3 million dollars?
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I looked it up on wikipedia and you're correct. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
It goes Mega(million, 10 to the 6), Giga(billion, 10 to the 9), Tera(trillion, 10 to the 12), Peta(quadrillion, 10 to the 15), Exa(quintillion, 10 to the 18), Zetta(sextillion, 10 to the 21) and Yotta(septillion, 10 to the 24).
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
And a "petahert"? :confused: PHz... :D
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by BillGeek
And a "petahert"? :confused: PHz... :D
i thought peta was against hurting
raypoz?
I don't suppose a collider creates a ray of positrons?
anyway, the thing simply LOOKS like a doomsday device.
Never could figure out why they just didn't launch a small version of one of these things into space. Automatic superconducting thanks to temp, no background radiation, etc. and more importantly, less destruction of earth.
Surely the mayan calendar wasn't off this far?
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
The world will end on 13/13/1313.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I reckon it will create an unstable black hole that will last a fraction of a microsecond and disappear causing no harm whatsoever. The real danger is how many graduate scientists they hire on minimal wages to sift through 5 years of research data to find the fact they created a blackhole.
If earth is destroyed in the space of 7 minutes I'll have just enough time to post a final msg on VBF before total infrastructure fails.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
i'd like to see the math involved. I was not aware that black holes were particles.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I guess there was no global catastrophe, at least not one that I'm aware of. It was supposed to be turned on yesterday. Here's another article I found on the Large Hadron Collider.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/20...achenbach-text
Quote:
If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.
Quote:
It sounds scary, and it is. Building the LHC in a tunnel was a prudent move. The particle beam could drill a hole in just about anything, although the most likely victim would be the apparatus itself. One minor calamity has already happened: A magnet all but jumped out of its skin during a test in March 2007. Since then 24 magnets have been retrofitted to fix a design flaw. The people running the LHC aren't in a rush to talk about all the things that can go wrong, perhaps because the public has a way of worrying that mad scientists will accidentally create a black hole that devours the Earth.
Quote:
The LHC experiments may help physicists understand our good fortune to be in a universe that grew with just enough more matter than antimatter.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
It may be that it hasn't been turned on yet. According to the Virgin Media article it was supposed to be turned on "this Sarturday" and the article was posted earlier this week. I was looking to see if there's some article that reported what happened when it was turned on. I found a USA Today article that says it will be turned on some time next month and the article was updated 2 and a half days ago. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...collider_N.htm
The USA Today article says that it may not run at full power until 2010.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I'll tell you one thing... that's one massive machine!!! :eek:
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
they weren't real specific. one in 40 million chance of global destrcution? is that a number that encompasses the life of the machine, or is it per use?
because people manage to win the lottery every day with worse odds than that.
or... what if that odd is per collision?
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
What are people worrying about? It's not like we are going to notice that we created a black hole which sucks us in... Everyone dies instantly and nobody will ever realize what happened... Unless there is some kind of heaven after all, but then we could just set up www.vbforums.heaven and no harm done...
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I say we through a wrench in the LHC. www.vbforums.heaven can wait.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
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Originally Posted by NickThissen
What are people worrying about? It's not like we are going to notice that we created a black hole which sucks us in... Everyone dies instantly and nobody will ever realize what happened... Unless there is some kind of heaven after all, but then we could just set up
www.vbforums.heaven and no harm done...
no we won't... we will hit the event horizon where time slows to a crawl and spend eternity in there watching the universe die around us.
Don't you know anything?
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I say there is no way a black hole is going to be created. You need enormous amounts of matter smashed into a tiny space. That's how black holes typically get created. When there's so much matter which results in enormous gravity overcoming the forces that hold atoms together and crushing the atoms into smaller areas than they normally occupy.
You might have some kind of mini-black hole but not something that's going to suck the whole earth in. You'd have to feed an enormous amount of matter into the black hole to make it powerful enough to suck the whole earth in. The amount of matter that you'd have to feed into it to do that isn't present here on earth.
For anyone interested in learning more about black holes I'd recommend The Collapsing Universe by Isaac Asimov. It was written over 20 years ago and I read it over 20 years ago but I don't think the theories have changed that much.
It says that even though gravity is a weak force when dealing with small amounts of matter because it keeps on adding up as you keep increasing mass gravity ends up overcoming the forces that hold atoms together when you have a great enough mass and it can crush the atoms into neutron stars or when the mass is even greater black holes. You need enormous amounts of matter to do that and we don't have enough matter in our solar system to create a black hole.
Only stars that are of sufficiently high mass are candidates to become black holes. Our sun isn't massive enough to become a black hole. So even if you fed all the mass from our sun into the LHC it wouldn't be getting enough mass to create a true black hole. You might create some kind of quasi-black hole that has a localized effect but I don't see it swallowing planet Earth.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I'm no expert on black holes. I just read part of a wikipedia article about them. It says the colliders like the Large Hadron Collider can create micro black holes. Micro black holes are not going to threaten a planet. They have masses much less than that of a star. Their effects are nothing like black holes that have the mass of a large star.
So yes the LHC could create one or more black holes but they would be micro black holes that do not have an effect anything like the black holes that have the mass of a large star or greater.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
I'm no expert on black holes. I just read part of a wikipedia article about them. It says the colliders like the Large Hadron Collider can create micro black holes. Micro black holes are not going to threaten a planet. They have masses much less than that of a star. Their effects are nothing like black holes that have the mass of a large star.
So yes the LHC could create one or more black holes but they would be micro black holes that do not have an effect anything like the black holes that have the mass of a large star or greater.
they don't need to have that large of a mass. If it behaves like a black hole it will not only generate gravity but be affected by it. It will burrow itself to the center of the earth and i don't care how long it takes, it will eventually eat the planet.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
This is from the widipedia article on black holes.
Quote:
Micro black holes (also mini black holes) have masses much less than that of a star. At these sizes the effects of quantum mechanics are expected to come into play. There is no known mechanism for them to form via normal processes of stellar evolution, but certain inflationary scenarios predicted their production during the early stages of the evolution of the universe. According to some theories of quantum gravity they may also be produced in the highly energetic reaction produced by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere or even in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider. The theory of Hawking radiation predicts that such black holes will evaporate in bright flashes of gamma radiation. NASA's GLAST satellite, to be launched in 2008, will search for such flashes as one of its scientific objectives.
Micro black holes don't have the stability of the high mass black holes. I don't believe that they would do what you are fearing they would do because micro black holes do not behave like the other classification of black holes.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
Your ISP won't ban you if you change your homepage to a news site. :afrog:
If only you knew. :blush:
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
I looked it up on wikipedia and you're correct. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
It goes Mega(million, 10 to the 6), Giga(billion, 10 to the 9), Tera(trillion, 10 to the 12), Peta(quadrillion, 10 to the 15), Exa(quintillion, 10 to the 18), Zetta(sextillion, 10 to the 21) and Yotta(septillion, 10 to the 24).
I need to step in here and clear this up. This is one issue that pisses me off, mainly because Wiki has it wrong. When dealing with transfer speeds, the numbers are based on the decimal system (10^x). But when dealing with storage, it's binary (2^x). A kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10).
Megabyte = 1024KB
Gigabyte = 1024MB
Terabyte = 1024GB
Petabyte = 1024TB
Hard drive manufacturers use terminology as "false" advertising because most people don't know what the terminology is. Ever get a 120 gig drive, only to find out it reads as 111 gigs? Look at the casing. Lower case first letter means 10^x, upper case means 2^x. They advertise 120gB, which equates to 111GB.
Oh, and b=bit, B=byte. One byte = 8 bits.
Somebody sticky this damn post so I never have to type it again.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Is a petabyte the preferred method of eating petabread?
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
I need to step in here and clear this up. This is one issue that pisses me off, mainly because Wiki has it wrong. When dealing with transfer speeds, the numbers are based on the decimal system (10^x). But when dealing with storage, it's binary (2^x). A kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10).
Megabyte = 1024KB
Gigabyte = 1024MB
Terabyte = 1024GB
Petabyte = 1024TB
Hard drive manufacturers use terminology as "false" advertising because most people don't know what the terminology is. Ever get a 120 gig drive, only to find out it reads as 111 gigs? Look at the casing. Lower case first letter means 10^x, upper case means 2^x. They advertise 120gB, which equates to 111GB.
Oh, and b=bit, B=byte. One byte = 8 bits.
Somebody sticky this damn post so I never have to type it again.
No. http://www.vbforums.com/attachment.p...7&d=1218052355
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
pita bread makes the cheese sweat.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
In fairness to wikipedia I'll quote them:
Quote:
A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes. It is commonly abbreviated PB. When used with byte multiples, the prefix may indicate a power of either 1000 or 1024, so the exact number may be either:
If you look at the wikipedia link I posted it will show both the decimal and binary forms of the different prefixes. In post # 11 I was just giving the decimal value for the prefixes but the wikipedia article has both.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I don't know how anyone can get pissed off about units of measurement, but just for the record...
kilo = 1,000
mega = 1,000,000
kilobyte (kB) = 1,000 bytes
megabyte (MB) = 1,000kB
kibi = 1,024
mebi = 1,048,576
kibibyte (KiB) = 1,024 bytes
mebibyte (MiB) = 1,024KiB
There. But everyone except salesfolk use powers of two in computing anyway, regardless of what they call them.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
And by the way kilo is 'k' not 'K'
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
I need to step in here and clear this up. This is one issue that pisses me off, mainly because Wiki has it wrong. When dealing with transfer speeds, the numbers are based on the decimal system (10^x). But when dealing with storage, it's binary (2^x). A kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10).
Megabyte = 1024KB
Gigabyte = 1024MB
Terabyte = 1024GB
Petabyte = 1024TB
Hard drive manufacturers use terminology as "false" advertising because most people don't know what the terminology is. Ever get a 120 gig drive, only to find out it reads as 111 gigs? Look at the casing. Lower case first letter means 10^x, upper case means 2^x. They advertise 120gB, which equates to 111GB.
Oh, and b=bit, B=byte. One byte = 8 bits.
Somebody sticky this damn post so I never have to type it again.
if wiki has it wrong, then why don't you FIX IT!!!!!:mad:
That's the whole purpose of Wiki: Readers can edit it!
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Surely, if the topic was that obvious, it wouldn't still be "wrong".
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by penagate
Surely, if the topic was that obvious, it wouldn't still be "wrong".
there isn't a standard on hard drive sizes anyway.
I remember a huge lawsuit years ago (lost) because people were upset that the filesystem was using up their drive's storage capacity.
Therefore a 500gb hard drive had a usable capacity of about 465gb.
they were under the opinion that this was entirely the fault of seagate and WD.
and let's not get in the whole base-2 versus base 10 thing.
Kilobyte is standard. giga means one million. The argument is whether or not giga is actually one million or one thousand kilobytes. Ridiculous. A million is a million.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Having caught up on this thread, I'm a little disappointed the world didn't end last Saturday.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Orwell
I remember a huge lawsuit years ago (lost) because people were upset that the filesystem was using up their drive's storage capacity.
I thought it was because of the ambiguity between 1,000 and 1,024 in the drive specifications. Or did it extend to capacity lost through formatting as well?
I'm fairly certain that hard drive manufacturers (and ISPs) in various countries are now obligate to state that "one kilobyte means 1,000 bytes".
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Orwell
there isn't a standard on hard drive sizes anyway.
I remember a huge lawsuit years ago (lost) because people were upset that the filesystem was using up their drive's storage capacity.
Therefore a 500gb hard drive had a usable capacity of about 465gb.
they were under the opinion that this was entirely the fault of seagate and WD.
and let's not get in the whole base-2 versus base 10 thing.
Kilobyte is standard. giga means one million. The argument is whether or not giga is actually one million or one thousand kilobytes. Ridiculous. A million is a million.
Did you completely miss my previous post where I explained that exact issue? I'm not even going to repost it. Open your eyes and read.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
It's times like these where I wonder if timeshifter joined that flat earth forum thing not to prove a point, but to just troll...
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
Did you completely miss my previous post where I explained that exact issue? I'm not even going to repost it. Open your eyes and read.
i did read it. I just happen to totally disagree with it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ME
a million is a million
in other words, a million is not 1024000 and most people wouldn't even make the mistake of thinking it is. But there are those who do, and they are WRONG.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Nobody said a million was 2^20 (1,048,576). It's not. A megabyte is 2^20 bytes. If you're going to make an arguement, at least have an argument to make before you try.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
If you're going to make an arguement, at least have an argument to make before you try.
Good advice! You should try it too.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
I need to step in here and clear this up. This is one issue that pisses me off, mainly because Wiki has it wrong. When dealing with transfer speeds, the numbers are based on the decimal system (10^x). But when dealing with storage, it's binary (2^x). A kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2^10).
Megabyte = 1024KB
Gigabyte = 1024MB
Terabyte = 1024GB
Petabyte = 1024TB
Hard drive manufacturers use terminology as "false" advertising because most people don't know what the terminology is. Ever get a 120 gig drive, only to find out it reads as 111 gigs? Look at the casing. Lower case first letter means 10^x, upper case means 2^x. They advertise 120gB, which equates to 111GB.
Oh, and b=bit, B=byte. One byte = 8 bits.
Somebody sticky this damn post so I never have to type it again.
I also forgot to mention one thing:
http://www.vbforums.com/
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
* Tap Tap * Could Someone Out There Please Turn Off The Matrix?
K. Thx. Bai
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Foxer
Has the world ended yet?
Is there any world now or are we just dreaming that there is?
This is from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
Chapter The Law of Miracles page 269
' From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe: its warp and woof is maya, illusion. Under analysis all its mirages of reality dissolve. As, one by one, the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his transgression of the Divine Command: "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me."'
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EntityX
This is from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
Chapter The Law of Miracles page 269
' From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe: its warp and woof is maya, illusion. Under analysis all its mirages of reality dissolve. As, one by one, the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his transgression of the Divine Command: "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me."'
Whats that mean (in 10 words or less)?
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
We're all figments of crptcblade's imagination.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Foxer
Whats that mean (in 10 words or less)?
There is something greater than everything we percieve through the senses.
That was 11 words but it's the best I could do.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
10 words:
There's something greater than everything we percieve through the senses.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
4 words:
No, there is not. :afrog:
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by timeshifter
Nobody said a million was 2^20 (1,048,576). It's not. A megabyte is 2^20 bytes. If you're going to make an arguement, at least have an argument to make before you try.
It's not 2^20. It's 10^6. Any mathematition or english major can tell you what Mega means. The only reason the issue is even on the table is due to the fact computers use base 2. It all started with kilo. "1024 is pretty close to 1000" says the nerd. Let's just call that a kilobyte" and the war was on. Even back then people didn't like this and argued over Kilo was exactly a thousand and who was said computer nerd to change the laws of nature?
Wiki clearly states in the kilobyte article that base2 is only used in electronics that are directly operating in base2, such as memory. Storage mediums (including hard drives and floppies) have traditionally used the actual value.
For another example, research body temperature. Let's just say the average temperature is not 98.6. Convert 98.6 to celsius and think about the result you get. Wunderlich rounded his results off. The actual value is closer to 98.2
Quote:
Originally Posted by BillGeek
4 words:
No, there is not. :afrog:
I can't percieve a tree falling in the woods therefore it never happened.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by LO
I can't percieve a tree falling in the woods therefore it never happened.
Exactly my point. ;) :thumb:
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
The LHC is still in the testing phase:-
Quote:
Posted by Freya Blekman on 12 Aug 2008 at 06:44 am
The LHC startup is getting closer and closer.
http://uslhc.us/blogs/?p=304#more-304
Gegearwian to mētan þīn metodscæft...
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
Quote:
Originally Posted by penagate
We're all figments of crptcblade's imagination.
Although I'd like to think that someone is thinking about me, it isn't happening, so that's that theory dispelled.
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Re: The End of the World is Nigh!
I was looking for the latest news on the Large Hadron Collider and came across this page that has some cool photos of the LHC or projects related to the LHC.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200..._collider.html